The Henson Journals

[130]

Tuesday, February 21st, 1928.

["]The creation of the League at the beginning of the 20th century and on the morrow of the great War was not an accident. Setting in after the Napoleonic period over a hundred years ago, a movement towards increasing international organization is clearly observable ever since. Promoted and hastened by the development of the means of communication, stimulated by the economic needs arising out of the international division of labour, large scale production, and world trade, as well as by the social & political needs which have resulted therefrom, this movement expressed itself in countless voluntary, semi–official, and official international associations & unions. The present League also is clearly the child of this vast co–operative movement. The World War, which is so often looked upon as its parent, might perhaps more fitly be described as a midwife who merely assisted at its birth. Now, the underlying factors which produced this movement are today more actively at work than ever before. It is therefore not to overstep [131] the bounds of scientific caution to believe that the League of Nations, viewed as the latest product of a long evolution tending towards the political organization of the world, will live and grow........

We believe in it also because we wish to avoid that which for men of science is almost worse than disloyalty and sin, namely blunder and error. If civilization does not overcome war, war, with the progress of science, will overcome civilization. Now suicide, individual and collective, although not an impossible accident, is not a likely contingency that it is rational to anticipate.["]

v. 'The League of Nations as an historical Fact by William E. Rappard, Recteur de l'Université de Genève. Aug: 19th, 1926

President Nicholas Murray Butler explains that Dr Rappard was formerly & for five years Director of the Mandates Section of the Secretariat & is at present member of the Permanent Mandates Commission. The whole lecture is printed in No 237 of the publications of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

[132] [symbol]

I wrote to the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of York asking them to join the Durham Castle Committee. Then I made notes for my speech on the League of Nations. Ella and I motored to Hurworth, & lunched with the Misses Forster. Cosgrave was there. After lunch we went in to Darlington for a meeting of the Preventive and Rescue Association. Then we returned to Auckland.

The murderer of William Abbey has been run to earth. He turns out to be a male nurse at the Sedgefield Lunatic Asylum, named Norman Elliott, who was married a few weeks since. His father, a police constable, committed suicide some years ago, so that we are allowed to conjecture that he himself is not altogether sane. Everybody heaves a sigh of relief on learning that the wretch is no longer at large.

Somebody sent me a sketch of Finnish ecclesiastical history. 'The Church of Finland by Aleksi Sentonen'. It is amusingly self–satisfied, but not uninteresting if it state the truth "the formal apostolic succession was in force in that church down to 1884', when all the sees became vacant owing to the death of all the bishops of the country. The new bishops received consecration from 'an eminent theologian & a duly ordained priest'!